MenuetOS sits in an interesting nexus between astonishing technical achievement and computerised work of art. The super-speedy, pre-emptive multitasking operating system is still, despite adding more driver support, more included applications, an improved GUI and digital TV support over the years, capable of fitting on a floppy disk (assuming you can find one).

MenuetOS is a technical marvel. Not only is it written entirely in assembly, it also shoves a fully capable multitasking operating system on a single floppy disk.

I also think there is another factor and that is hardware limitations. The Commodore 64 and Amiga, for example, had limited hardware and certainly in the case of the C64 near impossible to upgrade.

So code was written to run well on those machines. Programmers came up with tricks to improve performance or use less memory. With PCs came a period where you were just required to add memory, a faster CPU, bigger hard disk, a new PC. Now I think were are in an age where the hardware is often more than enough to run most applications without breaking a sweat, so there's no incentive for programmers to make code efficient or smaller. They code something and it works fine, so why spend time optimizing it?

Honestly it's hard to blame them and I would do the same thing.

But then you see (and hear) a demo run on a 1 Mhz Commodore 64 with 64 kB of RAM and you start to wonder if your modern computer should't be able to run much much faster.